Natural History

It is hard to explain the special place that orchids occupy in our hearts and imaginations. Their attraction can’t be solely attributed to their strange form, longevity, or apparent scarcity, since there are many other flowers equally blessed that are not treated with the same passionate intensity and reverence. For some reason, orchids have become imbued with some kind of mystery, desire, and exoticism that has less to do with anything intrinsic about their biology or appearance and everything to do with the stories, myths, and legends that have been created around them.

‘Tasmania is in a new age of fire,’ writes Andrew Darby in an article for The Guardian. The fires in February, which came close to destroying ancient Huon pines in the takayna/Tarkine and pencil pines near Cradle Mountain, were started by a dry lightning strike, as were the fires which tore through the Grove of Giants six years ago. Lightning strikes were once responsible for less than 0.01 per cent of bushfires in Tasmania but now account for the vast majority, an eight thousand per cent increase over a decade. ‘Quite honestly,’ says Jon Marsden-Smedley, a former fire management officer interviewed by Darby, ‘I don’t know of any other climate-change parameter that is as dramatic.’

For much of the nineteenth century, John Gould (1804-81) was known internationally as ‘the bird man’. His fame derived from two main sources: first, as the author and publisher of a series of sumptuous, folio-sized books featuring beautiful, hand-coloured lithographs of birds from particular regions or spectacular bird families; secondly, by using his position as an ornithologist at the Zoological Society of London to amass an unequalled collection of stuffed birds to use as reference material. Such was his fame that collectors and natural scientists from Charles Darwin down sought his advice about species identities and relationships. In a local context, Gould is rightfully regarded as a giant of Australian ornithology. He described and named over 400 species of birds and mammals collected in Australia.

For a creature born to life as a small songbird, days and nights can be treacherous. At any moment, a goshawk, a cat, or a goanna may be lurking, waiting to turn the songbird into supper. So these pretty little prey objects – scrubwrens and lorikeets and honeyeaters and the like – have developed an astute group behaviour. One bird spots the predator and issues an alarm call. Others hear it and zip out from behind branch and leaf to surround the threat, all of them twitting and hissing and flitting about, a mixed-species hullabaloo that together harasses the predator into pitiful retreat. This behaviour, known as a ‘mobbing flock’, is an evolutionary survival response. It is beautiful in its ingenuity, and the conviction it displays in the power of the collective. It is, to draw a metaphor from the literary ecosystem, an anthological act, a communal relay of meaning born of a shared inner urgency.

There is something intrinsically appealing about patterns and order. Give a child a tin of buttons and they will immediately organise them by colour, size, or shape. Collect a bucket of shells from the beach and most people do the same thing. Some might choose the prettiest, largest, and most striking representatives of each type and display them prominently; others might cluster them by species and grade them in their variations from smallest to largest, darkest to lightest. Few will give much thought to the creatures that once inhabited them, the environments they came from, or how they lived.

The Iranian city of Ramsar, overlooking the Caspian Sea, was the site of a meeting that brought together delegates from around the world at the beginning of 1971. The meeting was held to determine the future global management of the world’s few remaining wetlands, vital habitats for transnational migratory bird species such as Latham’s Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii), which fly annually between Australia and Japan.

The photograph arrives while I am reading Dave Witty’s What the Trees See. A tree’s branch close-up, outer brown-red bark peeled back to smooth and brilliant green. A friend, spotting it on Quandamooka Country in Minjerribah, North Stradbroke Island, has been understandably stopped in her tracks. Framed intimately like this, its shape and textures suggest warm musculature: lean in, you will be held. This beautiful creature.

Fifty years ago (when I was a very young scholar), I was asked to write an essay review of some recently published books about the Huxleys. None of them in my view, including Julian Huxley’s own volume of Memories (1970), did justice to their subjects’ scientific achievements and social concerns. Half a century later we now have Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family. It has most definitely been worth the wait. Indeed this work is the crowning achievement of her distinguished career. 

The image of a solitary goldfish aimlessly circling in a glass bowl recurs in cartoons and children’s books, a metaphor for a crowded and over-scrutinised life. John Simons’s account of the mid-nineteenth-century aquarium craze reveals the rather horrifying historical reality of this mostly symbolic image. At the height of the craze for aquariums, not only were resilient goldfish kept in bowls, but a wide range of wild-caught marine and estuarine life were dredged from the British coastline and plunged into buckets, bowls, tubs, pots, as well as glass aquariums of various sizes, with precious little consideration given to the complex needs of maintaining aquatic ecosystems in captivity. The death toll, not to mention the smell, must have been horrifying. As Simons points out, the British seaside has never truly recovered from this mass decimation.

Family histories are always complicated. Delia (‘Mickie’) Akeley and her monkey, JT Jr, are the titular family in this intriguing book, but its story includes the grand global family of colonial museums, and the personal families of Theodore Roosevelt and the author, Iain McCalman.